----- Original Message -----
From: Brian Mattox
Sent: Monday, August 03, 2009
Subject: Any wonder why 9-11 Truth is censored by the major media?
Published on Sunday, August 2, 2009 by Salon.com
GE's Silencing of Olbermann and MSNBC's Sleazy Use of Richard Wolffe
by Glenn Greenwald
The New York Times this morning [1] has a remarkable story, and incredibly,
the article's author, Brian Stelter, doesn't even acknowledge, let alone
examine, what makes the story so significant. In essence, the chairman of
General Electric (which owns MSNBC), Jeffrey Immelt, and the chairman of
News Corporation (which owns Fox News), Rupert Murdoch, were brought into a
room at a "summit meeting" for CEOs in May, where Charlie Rose tried to
engineer an end to the "feud" between MSNBC's Keith Olbermann and Fox's Bill
O'Reilly. According to the NYT, both CEOs agreed that the dispute was bad
for the interests of the corporate parents, and thus agreed to order their
news employees to cease attacking each other's news organizations and
employees.
Most notably, the deal wasn't engineered because of a perception that it was
hurting either Olbermann or O'Reilly's show, or even that it was hurting
MSNBC. To the contrary, as Olbermann himself has acknowledged, his battles
with O'Reilly have substantially boosted his ratings. The agreement of the
corporate CEOs to cease criticizing each other was motivated by the belief
that such criticism was hurting the unrelated corporate interests of GE and
News Corp:
The reconciliation -- not acknowledged by the parties until now --
showcased how a personal and commercial battle between two men could create
real consequences for their parent corporations. A G.E. shareholders'
meeting, for instance, was overrun by critics of MSNBC (and one of Mr.
O'Reilly's
producers) last April. . . .
In late 2007, Mr. O'Reilly had a young producer, Jesse Watters, ambush
Mr. Immelt and ask about G.E.'s business in Iran, which is legal, and which
includes sales of energy and medical technology. G.E. says it no longer does
business in Iran.
Mr. O'Reilly continued to pour pressure on its corporate leaders, even
saying on one program last year that "If my child were killed in Iraq, I
would blame the likes of Jeffrey Immelt." The resulting e-mail to G.E. from
Mr. O'Reilly's viewers was scathing. . .
Over time, G.E. and the News Corporation concluded that the fighting
"wasn't good for either parent," said an NBC employee with direct knowledge
of the situation. But the session hosted by Mr. Rose provided an
opportunity for a reconciliation, sealed with a handshake between Mr. Immelt
and Mr. Murdoch.
Though Olbermann denies he was part of any deal, the NYT says that there has
been virtually no criticism of Fox by Olbermman, or MSNBC by O'Reilly, since
June 1 when the deal took effect. That's mostly but not entirely true. On
June 17 [2], after President Obama accused Fox News of fomenting hostility
towards his agenda, and Fox responded by saying that the "other networks"
were pure pro-Obama outlets, Olbermann did voice fairly stinging criticisms
of Fox as "more of a political entity than is the Republican National
Committee right now, only it's fraudulently disguised as some sort of news
organization."
But a review of all of Olbermann's post-June 1 shows [3] does reveal that he
has not ever criticized (or even mentioned) Bill O'Reilly since then and
barely ever mentions Fox News any longer. And on June 1 -- the last time
Olbermann mentioned O'Reilly -- Olbermann claimed at the end of his
broadcast [4] that he would cease referring to O'Reilly in the future
because ignoring him (and "quarantining" Fox) would supposedly help get
O'Reilly off the air ("So as of this show's end, I will retire the name, the
photograph, and the caricature").
So here we have yet another example -- perhaps the most glaring yet -- of
the corporations that own our largest media outlets controlling and
censoring the content of their news organizations based on the unrelated
interests of the parent corporation. In light of that, just marvel at what
the supreme establishment-power-worshiper Charlie Rose said dismissively in
March, 2003 [5], when he had Amy Goodman on his show as a condescending
example of someone who opposed the Iraq War, after Goodman touted the vital
importance of "independent media" in America:
ROSE: I don't know what "independent" means -- "independent" in
contrast to what?
GOODMAN: It means not being sponsored by the corporations, the
networks -- like NBC, CBS, ABC: NBC owned by General Electric, CBS owned by
Viacom, or ABC owned by Disney --
ROSE: My point in response to that would be that we do need you . . . .
Having said that, I promise you, CBS News and ABC News and NBC News are not
influenced by the corporations that may own those companies. Since I know
one of them very well and worked for one of them.
That's the very same Charlie Rose who sat there with the CEO of GE and the
CEO of News Corp. as an agreement was reached to order their news employees
to stop criticizing the activities of Fox and GE in order to protect the
corporate interests of those parents.
It makes no difference what one thinks of O'Reilly's attacks on the
corporate activities of GE or Olbermann's criticisms of O'Reilly and Fox
News. Whatever one's views on that are -- and I watch neither show very
often -- those are perfectly legitimate subjects for news reporting and
commentary, and the corporate decree to stop commenting on those topics is
nothing less than corporate censorship. A reader last night put it this way
by email:
It's interesting and somewhat shocking to me that a NYT article wouldn't
even mention the effect on the hosts' journalistic freedom. . . . I assume
that both Olbermann and O'Reilly would not have agreed to the truce, as the
battle is ratings gold for both of them, and I'm sure they frankly hate each
other and enjoy it.
The sad truth is that what Olbermann and O'Reilly were doing in this
particular instance was one of the rare examples of good journalism on these
types of shows. Olbermann was holding O'Reilly's feet to the fire about his
repeated falsehoods and embarrassing positions. In turn, O'Reilly was giving
the public accurate and disturbing information about General Electric,
including extensive technology dealings with Iran. In my personal opinion,
this was one of the rare useful pieces of information O'Reilly ever
presented to his audience, and Olbermann was there to show how lousy the
rest of O'Reilly's information was. Though it was in the context of a
bitter feud, the two men were actually engaging in real journalism, at least
in this case.
So now GE is using its control of NBC and MSNBC to ensure that there is no
more reporting by Fox of its business activities in Iran or other
embarrassing corporate activities, while News Corp. is ensuring that the
lies spewed regularly by its top-rated commodity on Fox News are no longer
reported by MSNBC. You don't have to agree with the reader's view of the
value of this reporting to be highly disturbed that it is being censored.
This is hardly the first time evidence of corporate control over the content
of NBC and MSNBC has surfaced. Last May, CNN's Jessica Yellin said [6] that
when she was at MSNBC, "the press corps was under enormous pressure from
corporate executives, frankly, to make sure that this [the Iraq War] was a
war that was presented in a way that was consistent with the patriotic fever
in the nation"; "the higher the president's approval ratings, the more
pressure I had from news executives ... to put on positive stories about the
president"; and "they would turn down stories that were more critical and
try to put on pieces that were more positive." Katie Couric said [7] that
when she was at NBC, "there was a lot of undercurrent of pressure not to
rock the boat for a variety of reasons, where it was corporate reasons or
other considerations" not to be too critical of the Bush administration.
MSNBC's rising star, Ashleigh Banfield, was demoted and then fired
after she criticized [8] news media organizations generally, and Fox News
specifically, for distorting their war coverage to appear more
pro-government. And, of course, when MSNBC canceled Phil Donahue's show in
the run-up to the Iraq war despite its being that network's highest-rated
program, a corporate memo surfaced [9] indicating that the company had fears
of being associated with an anti-war and anti-government message.
And now we have an example of GE's forcibly silencing the top-rated
commentator on MSNBC -- ordering him not to hold Fox News accountable any
longer -- because, in return, News Corp. has agreed to silence its own
commentators from criticizing GE. The corporations that own our largest
news organizations have extensive relationships with the federal government.
Anyone (like Charlie Rose) who denies that those relationships influence how
these news organizations "report" on the government -- driven by the desire
which corporate executives have to avoid alienating the government officials
on whom their corporate interests depend, or avoid alienating potential
customer bases for their products -- is completely delusional. GE's forcing
Keith Olbermann to cease his criticism of Fox News and Bill O'Reilly is a
clear and vivid example of how that works.
* * * * *
On a very related note: this week, former Newsweek reporter Richard Wolffe
was a guest-host [10] on MSNBC's Countdown while Keith Olbermann is on
vacation. When Olbermann is there, Wolffe is a very frequent guest on
Countdown [10], where [11] he is called an "MSNBC political analyst" [12]
and comments on political news [13]. All of this, despite the fact that
Wolffe left Newsweek last March in order to join "Public Strategies, Inc.,"
the corporate communications firm run by former Bush White House
Communications Director Dan Bartlett, its President and CEO [14]. According
to the Press Release [15] they issued to announce Wolffe's joining the
company:
Wolffe, most recently Newsweek's senior White House correspondent,
officially assumes his new position as a senior strategist on April 13,
2009. He will be based in the firm's Washington office, where he will advise
several of its top clients. . . .
Public Strategies, Inc. is a business advisory firm that serves a
diverse clientele including some of the world's largest and best-known
corporations, nonprofit organizations, associations and professional firms.
Public Strategies helps forward-thinking organizations assess public opinion
and risk, and develops strategies for managing corporate reputation and
uncertainty. Much of its practice involves managing high-stakes campaigns
for corporate clients, anticipating and responding to crises.
Having Richard Wolffe host an MSNBC program -- or serving as an almost daily
"political analyst" -- is exactly tantamount to MSNBC's just turning over
an hour every night to a corporate lobbyist. Wolffe's role in life is to
advance the P.R. interests of the corporations that pay him, including
corporations with substantial interests [16] in virtually every political
issue that MSNBC and Countdown cover. Yet MSNBC is putting him on as a
guest-host and "political analyst" on one of its prime-time political shows.
What makes that even more appalling is that, as Ana Marie Cox first noted
[17], neither MSNBC nor Wolffe even disclose any of this.
[18] This is a conflict so severe that it's incurable by disclosure: who
wouldn't realize that you can't present paid corporate hacks as objective
political commentators? But the fact that they don't even bother to
disclose that just serves to illustrate how non-existent is the line between
corporate interests and "news reporting" in the United States. Then again,
Wolffe himself -- when it was previously revealed that he was exploiting his
position as a Newsweek reporter covering the Obama campaign to leverage
access to Obama in order to write a glowing book about him -- said this
[19]:
And [Wolffe] suggested he's not that different from other reporters in
an era in which the business and the profession of journalism have gotten
closer and closer.
"The idea that journalists are somehow not engaged in corporate
activities is not really in touch with what's going on. Every conversation
with journalists is about business models and advertisers," he said,
recalling that, on the day after the 2008 election, Newsweek sent him to
Detroit to deliver a speech to advertisers.
"You tell me where the line is between business and journalism," he
said.
That's who MSNBC is presenting as a host and "political analyst" on one of
its news commentary programs: someone who is paid by large corporations to
propagandize the public and who explicitly says that "journalists are
engaged in corporate activities." Then again, MSNBC itself is censored by
its corporate executives to ensure that the parent company's corporate
interests are advanced by its "news reporting," so in many ways, Wolffe's
sleaze and corporate whoredom are the perfect face for this network.
These dual stories of GE/Olbermann and Wolffe reveal what NBC and MSNBC
really are about as vividly as anything since the "military analyst"
scandal. Remember that indescribably informative NBC News/MSNBC scandal:
when it was revealed that both news outlets (along with most other major
television outlets) were presenting as "independent military analysts" a
whole slew of former Generals with substantial, undisclosed corporate
interests [20] in the policies they were promoting and doing so in
coordination with a secret Pentagon propaganda program [21]? Despite
front-page NYT promotion, Congressional investigations, and even a Pulitzer
Prize awarded to the NYT's David Barstow for uncovering all of that, NBC's
Brian Williams (like virtually every other news outlet) to this day has
never so much as informed his viewers of this story [22], and they continue
to use some of those very same former generals as "analysts."
There are many reasons why our establishment press exists to do little other
than serve the interests of the political and financial establishment and to
mindlessly amplify government claims. The virtual disapparance of the line
between large corporate interests and journalism (as Richard Wolffe himself
noted) is certainly one of the leading factors.
UPDATE: On Richard Wolffe's bio page at Public Strategies, Inc. [23], the
role he plays on MSNBC and NBC News is actually touted to the firm's
corporate clients and potential clients:
In addition, Wolffe is an NBC political analyst. He provides political
commentary on several MSNBC programs, Meet The Press, and TODAY.
They're basically telling their clients and prospective clients: if you
hire us to control and disseminate your political messaging, you'll have
someone working for you -- Richard Wolffe -- who has a regular platform on
MSNBC and NBC News, where he's presented as an independent "political
analyst." And this is how they describe what he does for the firm: "Wolffe
provides high-level counsel and insight to our clients on how to manage
their reputations in a complex public environment." How much more blatantly
sleazy could that be?
© 2009 Salon.com
Glenn Greenwald was previously a constitutional law and civil rights
litigator in New York. He is the author of the New York Times Bestselling
book "How Would a Patriot Act? [24]," a critique of the Bush
administration's use of executive power, released in May 2006. His second
book, "A Tragic Legacy [25]", examines the Bush legacy.
Article printed from www.CommonDreams.org
URL to article: http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/08/02-4
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